Ernesto Schick - Railway Flora

Railway Flora or nature’s revenge on man. Botanical observations on the area around the international marshalling yard of Chiasso, 1969–1978 is a small botanical handbook – midway between a travel diary and a science manual – that tells of the astonishing proliferation of spontaneous plants in the vicinity of Chiasso’s international station, where the completion of a new, large complex of train tracks in the ’50s and ’60s eradicated the local vegetation. First published in 1980, this book became a small cult object that inspired the poet Fabio Pusterla to write a poem for Schick’s ‘pilot plants,’ featured in this edition. Railway Flora bears witness to the painstaking research of an all but common man and his scrutiny of the complex relationship between human beings and their environment. A tale of biodiversity along the tracks of a frontier station.